Men from Boys

by John Harvey

  ‘“I don’t believe you mean it,” Adrian said.

  ‘The man pointed the gun right at him. “Go. Before I change my mind and shoot you.”

  ‘Adrian scrambled up the grassy bank. I could hear him crying. I had never felt so alone in my life. Inside, I was praying for the man to tell Adrian to come back, the way he had with me. I didn’t want to die alone by the dirty canal. I wanted to go home and see my mum and dad again.

  ‘This time my prayers were answered.

  ‘“Come back,” he said. “I’ve changed my mind.”

  ‘“Are you going to shoot us?” I asked, when Adrian once again stood at my side, wiping his eyes on his sleeve.

  ‘“I don’t know,” he said. ‘It depends on what they tell me to do. Just shut up and let me think. Don’t talk unless I ask you to.”

  ‘They? What on earth was he talking about? Adrian and I looked at one another, puzzled. There was nobody else around. Who was going to tell him what to do? You have to remember we were only kids, and we didn’t know anything about insane people hearing voices and all that.

  ‘“But why?” I asked. “Why are you doing this? We haven’t done you any harm.”

  ‘He didn’t say anything, just fired a shot – pop – into the bushes right beside me. It was enough. Then he started talking again, and I think both Adrian and me now had an inkling that he was hearing the voices in his head, and that maybe he was having a conversation with the mysterious “they” he had mentioned.

  ‘“All right,” he said, the next time he calmed down. He pointed the gun at me. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  ‘“Joe,” I said.

  ‘“Joe. All right, Joe. You can go. What’s your friend’s name?”

  ‘“Adrian.”

  ‘“Adrian stays.”

  ‘I stood my ground. “You’re not going to let me go,” I told him. “You’ll only do the same as you did before.”

  ‘That made him angry and he started waving the gun around again. “Go!” he yelled at me. “Now! Before I shoot you right here.”

  ‘I went.

  ‘Sure enough, when I got to the hole in the fence, I heard him laugh, a mad, eerie sound that sent a chill through me despite the heat of the day. “You didn’t think I meant it, did you? Come back here, Joe.”

  ‘Somehow, the use of my name, the sound of it from his lips, on his breath, was worse than anything else. For a moment, I hesitated then I slipped through the hole in the railings and started running for my life.

  ‘I knew that there was a hollow about thirty feet up the grassy slope, and if I reached it I would be safe. It was only a quick dash from there to the woods.

  ‘I heard him shout again. “Joe, come back here right now!”

  ‘I ran and ran. I heard the dull pop of his revolver and sensed something whiz by my right side and thud into the earth. My heart was pumping for all it was worth and the muscles on my legs felt fit to burst.

  ‘But I made it. I made it to the hollow and dived into the dip in the ground that would protect me from any more bullets. I heard just one more popping sound before I made my dash for the woods and that was it.’

  Here, Joe paused, as if recounting the narrative had left him as out of breath as outrunning the lunatic’s bullets. From our trench, we could hear more shots in the distance now and a shell exploded about two hundred yards to the west, lighting up the sky. Further away, somewhere behind our lines, a piper played. I handed around my cigarettes and noticed Jack Armstrong in the subdued glow of the match. Face ashen, eyes glazed, lips trembling, the kid was terrified and it was my guess that he’d freeze when the command came. I’d seen it happen before. Not that I blamed him. I sometimes wondered why we didn’t all react that way. There but for the grace of God . . . I remembered Harry Mercer, who had tried for a Blighty in the foot and ended up losing the entire lower half of his left leg. Then there was Ben Castle, poor, sad Ben, who swore he’d do it himself before the Germans did it to him, and calmly put his gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. So who were the heroes? And why?

  ‘What happened next?’ asked Arthur. ‘Did you run and fetch the police?’

  ‘The police? No,’ said Joe. ‘I don’t really remember what I did. I think I just wandered around in a daze. I couldn’t believe it had happened, you see, that I had been so close to death and escaped.’

  ‘But what about your friend? What about Adrian?’ Arthur persisted.

  Joe looked right through him, as if he hadn’t even heard the question. ‘I waited until it was time to return home from school,’ he went on, ‘and that’s exactly what I did. Went home. The piss stains on my trousers and underwear had dried by then, and if my mother noticed the next time she did the washing then she didn’t say anything to me about it. We went on holiday the next day to stay for a week with my Aunt Betty on the coast near Scarborough. Every day I scoured my dad’s newspaper when he’d put it aside after breakfast, but I could find no reference to the lunatic with the gun. I even started to believe that it had all been a figment of my imagination, that it hadn’t happened at all.’

  ‘But what about Adrian?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘Adrian? I had no idea. That whole week we were with Aunt Betty I wondered about him. Of course I did. But surely if anything had happened it would have been in the papers? Still, I knew I had deserted Adrian. I had dashed off to freedom and hadn’t given him a second thought once I was in the woods.’

  ‘But you must have seen him again,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the funny thing,’ Joe said. ‘I did. It was about two days after we got back from our holiday. I saw him in the street. He started walking towards me. I was frightened because he was a year older than me, and bigger. I thought he was going to beat me up.’

  ‘What did he do?’ Arthur asked.

  Joe laughed. ‘That’s the funny thing,’ he said. ‘Adrian walked up to me. I braced myself for an assault, and he said, “Thank you.”

  ‘I wasn’t certain I’d heard him correctly, so I asked him to repeat what he’d said.

  ‘“Thank you,” he said again. “That was a very brave thing you did, dodging the bullets like that, risking death.”

  ‘I was stunned. I didn’t know what to say. I must have stood there looking like a complete idiot, with my mouth hanging open.

  ‘“Had he gone?” he asked me next.

  ‘“Who?” I replied.

  ‘“You know. The lunatic with the gun. I’ll bet he’d gone when you came back with the police, hadn’t he?’

  ‘Now I understood what Adrian was thinking. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, he’d gone.”

  ‘Adrian nodded. “I thought so. Look, I’m sorry,” he went on, “sorry I didn’t hang around till you got back with them, to help you explain and all, but I was so scared.”

  ‘“What happened?” I asked.

  ‘“Well,” Adrian said, “as soon as you made it to the woods, he ran off down the canal bank. He must have known you’d soon be back with help, and he didn’t want to hang around and get caught. I probably stood there for a few moments to pull myself together, then I headed off in the same direction you did. I just went home as if I’d been to school and didn’t say a word to anyone. I’m sorry,” he said again. “I should have stuck around when you came back with the police.”

  ‘“It’s all right,” I said. “They didn’t believe me. They thought I was just a trouble-maker. One of them gave me a clip around the ear and they sent me home. Said if anything like that ever happened again they’d tell my mum and dad.”

  ‘Adrian managed to laugh at that. I was feeling so relieved I could have gone on all day making things up. How I went back to try and rescue Adrian by myself and found the man a little further down the bank. How I carried the loose railing like a spear and threw it at him across the canal, piercing him right through the heart. Then how I weighted his body with stones and dropped it in the water. But I didn’t. It was enough that I was exonerated in Adrian’s eyes. Good enough that I was
a hero.’

  Joe began to laugh and it sounded so eerie, so mad, that it sent shivers up our spines. Jack Armstrong started crying. He wasn’t going anywhere. And Joe was still laughing when the black night inched towards another grey dawn and the orders came down for us to go over the top and take a godforsaken blemish on the map called Passchendaele.

  CONCERTO FOR VIOLENCE AND ORCHESTRA

  James Sallis

  To the memory of Jean-Patrick Manchette

  It is a beautiful fall day and he has driven nonstop, two days chewed down to the rind and the rind spit out, from New York. He should be tired, exhausted in fact, spent, but he isn’t. Every few hours he stops for a meal, briefly trading the warm vinyl Volvo seat for one not unlike it in a string of Shoneys, Dennys and Union 76 truckstops. On the seat and the floorboard beside him are packets of water crackers, plugs of cheese, bottles of selzer and depleted carry-out cups of coffee, wasabi peas. In the old world he drove away from, tips of leaves had gone crimson, bright yellow and orange, gold. Now he is coming into the desert outside Phoenix, the nearest thing he ever had to a home. Crisp morning air rushes into open windows. He passes an ostrich farm, impossibly canting stacks of huge stone like primitive altars out among the low scrub and cholla, a burning car at roadside with no one nearby. On the radio a song he vaguely remembers from what he thinks of as Back Then plays. He is happy. Strangely, this has nothing to do with the fact that soon he will be dead or that within the past month he has killed four people.

  Pryor was the one who told him about it. There were these small rooms behind the huge open basement area used for church dinners, summer Bible School, youth meetings, evenings of amateur entertainment where groups of teenagers blackened faces with burnt cork and donned peculiar hats for minstrel shows, nerdish young men in ill-fitting suits and top hats urged objects from thin air and underscored the tentativeness of it all by transforming silk handkerchiefs to doves, sponge balls to coins, and where the church’s music director in his hairpiece trucked out again and again, relentlessly, his repertoire of pantomime skits: a man flying for the first time, a foreigner confronted for the first time by jello, a child on his first fishing trip forced to bait his own hook. (Is there something intrinsically funny about firsts?)

  In the ceiling of one of those rooms was a small framed section, like a doorway. You could drag the table beneath, Pryor said, place a chair on the table, reach up and push the inset away. Then you could climb up in there. And if you kept going, always up, along stairways and ladders and catwalks, in and out of cramped crawl spaces, eventually you’d arrive at the steeple, where few before had ever ventured. A great secret, Pryor intimated. The whole climb was probably the equivalent of three floors at the most. But to Quentin’s eyes and imagination then, the climb seemed vast, illimitable, and he felt as though he might be ascending into a different, perhaps even a better, world.

  It would not take much, after all. For it to be a better world.

  Pushing the door out of its frame and pulling up from the chair, legs flailing, Quentin found himself in a low chamber much like a closet turned on its side. He couldn’t stand erect, but the far end of the chamber was unenclosed, and he passed through into an open, vaultlike space with a narrow walkway of bare boards nailed to beams. The nailheads were the size of dimes. Four yards or so further along, this walkway turned sharply right, fetching up rather soon at the base of a stairway steep and narrow as a ladder. The last few yards indeed became a ladder. Then he was there. Alone and far above the mundane, the ordinary, all those lives in their suits and cars and their cluttered houses with pot roasts cooking in ovens and laundry drying on lines out back. Quentin had seen Around the World in Eighty Days half a dozen times. This must be what it was like to go up in a balloon, float free, feel the ground surrender its claim on you. He was becoming David Niven.

  Meanwhile he’d given no thought to Pryor, who seemed to have failed to follow, if indeed Pryor had begun at all.

  Sunday School teacher Mr Robert, however, had been giving them both thought. He’d only a quarter-hour past dismissed the boys and now took note of their absence from services. So it was that, shortly after attaining his steeple, Quentin found himself being escorted down the aisle alongside Pryor and deposited in a front pew as Brother Douglas paused dramatically in his sermon, light fell like an accusing finger through stained-glass windows illustrating parables and the entire congregation looked on.

  He was caught that time, but never again.

  The steeple became Quentin’s special place. Just as other children spend hours and whole days of their lives sunk into books, board games or television, so Quentin spent his in the steeple, there by speaker horns that had taken the place of bells, sandwiches and a thermos of juice packed away in his school lunch box. Since of all things at his disposal his parents were least likely to miss one can of it among many, the sandwiches were generally Spam, which Quentin liked with mayonnaise and lots of pepper, sometimes sliced pickles. The bread was white, the juice that in name only, wholly innocent of fruit, rather some marvelous, alchemical compounding of concentrates, artificial flavors and Paracelsus knows what else.

  Sometimes up there in the steeple Quentin would pull himself to the edge and lie prone, propping elbows at the correct angle and sighting along an imaginary rifle as Jenny Bulow, Doug Prather or the straggling Dowdy family climbed from cars and crossed the parking lot below.

  Years later, half a world away and more than once, Quentin would find himself again in exactly that same position.

  But this has nothing to do with his life now, he always insisted – to himself, for few others knew about it. That was another time, another place. Another person, you might as well say. Quentin came home from that undeclared war and its long aftermath an undeclared hero even to himself, and after much searching (You have no college? You have to have college!) took a job at Allied Beverage, where he still works. Where he worked until last month, at least. He hasn’t been in, or called, and doubts they’ve held the position for him. It’s not as though they’d have much difficulty finding someone to take up his slack: keep track of health-care benefits, paid time off, excused absences, time and attendance, IRAs. Holidays the company loaded employees up with discontinued lines, champagnes no one asked to the prom, odd bottled concoctions of such things as cranberry juice and vodka, lemonade and brandy, licorice-flavored liqueurs. After work they’d all be out in the parking lot stowing this stuff in trunks. It would follow them home, go about its unassuming existence on various shelves and in various cabinets till, months or years later, it got thrown out. The company made little more ado over throwing away its people.

  He pushed. Recently there’d been rain, and enough water remained to bear the body away. But you couldn’t see the water. It looked as though the body were sliding on its back, on its own momentum, along the canal. Further on, an oil slick broke into a sickly rainbow. Food wrappers, drink containers, condoms, beer cans and unidentifiable bits of clothing decorated the canal’s edge. Down here one entered an elemental world, cement belly curved like a ship’s hold, walls to either side as far as one could see. Jonah’s whale, what Mars or the moon might look like, a landscape even more basic than that stretching for endless miles around the city. Out there, barren land and plants like something dredged from sea bottoms. He looked up. Air shimmered atop the canal’s cement walls, half a dozen palm trees thrust shaggy heads into the sky. The body moved slowly away from him in absolute silence. Out a few yards, it hit deeper water, an imperceptible incline perhaps, and picked up speed, began to turn slowly round and round. Water had soaked into the fabric of the man’s cheap blue suit and turned it purple. Blue dye spread out like a stain in the water beneath him. When he looked up again, two kids were there on the wall, peering over. Their eyes went back and forth from the body to him. He waved.

  He’d picked up a new car nearby, in one of those suburbs with walls behind which the rich live so safely, at a mall there. Tempted by a Lexus, he settled on
a Honda Accord. That’s what this country does, of course, it holds out temptation after temptation, forever building appetites that can’t be assuaged. He didn’t know if the Crown Vic was on anyone’s list yet, but over the past few days he’d pushed it pretty hard. Probably time to change mounts. He left it there by the Accord. The whole exchange took perhaps five minutes.

  For that matter, he had no reason to believe anyone might be on him, but one didn’t take chances. Never move in straight lines.

  He drove out of town, out into the desert, everything earth-colored so that it was difficult to say where city ended, desert began. But after a time, the walls, walls around individual houses, walls around whole communities, petered away. Lemon trees were in bloom, filling the air with their sweet sting. Bursts of vivid oleander at roadside. Imperial cactus.

  The Accord handled wonderfully, a pleasure to drive. He settled back and, looking about, started to come to some sense of the life its owner lived. A small life, circumscribed, routine. Scattering bits of rainbow, a crystal key chain swung from the rear-view mirror. The compartment behind the gear shift held tapes of Willie Nelson, Johnny Mathis, Enya, Van Morrison. A much-thumbed copy of Atlas Shrugged on the floor. The owner had tossed empty water bottles behind his seat after screwing the tops back on, so that many of them had collapsed into themselves. There were a couple of bronchodilator inhalers in the glove compartment. Find yourself without one, tap the guy next to you and borrow his: everyone in the state carries them. Physicians used to send what were then called chest patients here for their health. They came, bringing their plants and their cars with them. Drive into Phoenix, the first thing you see’s a brown film on the horizon. The city diverts water from all over to keep lawns and golf courses green, buys electric power at a premium to run the city’s myriad air conditioners. Its children gulp for air.